Card Issuers FAQ's

Ethoca Alerts

1. Who is Ethoca?

Founded in 2005

Headquarters in Toronto and offices located in Austin, London and Dublin.

Ethoca’s network consists of card issuing banks and online merchants working cooperatively together through a single, automated, secure connection outside the payment networks stream to their mutual benefit.

Countless times a day, card issuers all over the world confirm and identify fraudulent and/or suspicious transactions that have gone through merchant systems undetected, resulting in unnecessary financial losses, administrative costs and frustrations for the merchants.

Ethoca’s platform closes this information gap between the card issuers and merchants, making this valuable information securely available in near real-time.

2. What are Ethoca Alerts?

Ethoca Alerts enable issuers (post-authorization) to easily and quickly notify merchants whenever the issuers have confirmed a card has been fraudulently used.

As an Issuer you can benefit from this service as it gives you the ability to recover funds from transactions that you may not have chargeback rights for.

The service also saves costs and associated fees including operational costs associated with processing RFI’s and chargebacks.

3. How do I participate?

To fully benefit from this program you would submit ‘confirmed’ fraudulent transactions or pending RFI’s/non-fraud chargebacks to Ethoca as well as create a window of time (e.g. a delay) prior to issuing the RFI/Chargeback.

4. Do I need to get our development team involved?

Through customization of our solution we aim to make the process as simple as possible to minimize or eliminate any required development work on your end.

If you have a report available today or a data team that can produce a report with the minimum require fields, Ethoca will customize our secure processing of the file.

Your agents have the ability to enter in the Alert data while they are closing the call with the cardholder.

Ethoca can customize our “Copy and Paste” tool that enables operators to select and copy transaction data from their in-house systems (e.g. TSYS, Falcon, etc.) and paste the information directly into the Ethoca portal.

5. What fraud or pending chargeback types do I send?

All pending chargeback types can be sent to Ethoca inclusive of both fraud and non-fraud coded pending chargebacks.

Note: It does not matter if the issuer initiated the callout to the cardholder or if the cardholder initiated it to the issuer – both types of origination can yield benefit to you when using Ethoca!

RFIs should also be sent, as many merchants will simply credit relevant transactions when alert is received.

6. How do I maximize my return with Ethoca?

Today we have issuers sending us confirmed cases of fraud or pending non-fraud chargebacks using a variety of interfaces (e.g. batch file, portal entry, real-time, etc.) and on various frequencies (e.g. real-time, every 15 minutes, daily), we have shown that a higher fraud-stop rate and credit rate is achieved the quicker the issuer can supply us with the data following confirmation.

Ensuring a lag exists between confirmations of fraud or pending non-fraud chargeback and the actual submission of the chargeback results in a greater probability the merchant will issue a credit that would eliminate the need for your organization to invest in the fees and operational costs associated with submission.

Ethoca is piloting other programs that are designed to both increase issuer revenue through increased acceptance while reducing exposure to fraud losses. Contact us for more details!

7. What other information regarding our operations could we share with Ethoca tomaximize success?

If Ethoca understands your recovery operations (e.g. manual vs. automated chargeback processes and associated lag times) and chargeback policies (e.g. chargebacks under value $X are written off, total account claim minimum needs to be $Y, etc.) then Ethoca can work with you to optimize your return.

8. How do I know if a transaction has been credited?

During your recovery process, your operators may already see within your systems that a credit has already arrived.

Alternatively, your operators can perform a quick search in the Ethoca portal to see if the merchant has issued a refund.

The system can also be configured such that a given team is alerted (via email) whenever a merchant has issued a credit.

9. Do merchants attempt to stop and credit 3DSecure transactions?

Yes! Our experience has shown that typical merchants using 3DSecure strategies are good corporate citizens and have a vested interest in stopping fraudulent transactions and crediting said transactions.

10. Is Ethoca secure?

Ethoca is PCI Certified and has been put under the microscope by many of the world’s largest financial institutions.

11. What type of reporting will I receive?

You can use the Ethoca Portal to configure various reports enabling you to review all alerts sent, their status and outcomes and download/export them to excel. You can also use this reporting interface to search for specific transactions.